Does debt consolidation affect your credit scores?

If by consolidating you mean a debt management plan thru a third party, then yes, it will damage your score significantly since you are not paying as agreed.

If you do debt settlement - negotiating a pay off of less than the current balance - then yes your credit is a trashed. A lot of it has to do with the fact you have to go late on the payments in order for them to settle so you have all those late payments in addition to the credit posting of "settled for less than full balance".

But you can rebuild your credit in a year or so and it's much much better than a bankruptcy. I had to choose either bk or settlement. I took settlement.

If you only have a month or two left on debt consolidation payments can you pay the debts directly without going through the debt consolidation company? I've been going around them and making the payments on my own. The monthly fees on the debt consolidation are high and their website recently shutdown under mysterious circumstances.

It is really a shame that people are given higher and higher available credit lines. You can call and ask the credit card companies to lower your available credit.
What is really sad is the baby boomers who have their dream house, hardly any bills at all and 1 of the 2 of them have no job. How do they come out on all this? They have perfect credit just below 800 and are stuggling to pay the house payment on time to keep their credit perfect in which they have worked for years to achieve. The feds need to come up with a "bail out" for those who have never been late on a payment and are having to draw from their 401K to meet their monthly bills.